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The Others

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

–The Great Gatsby

While writing yesterday’s tirade about the conservative industrial complex and their poverty pimps, I kept thinking about the weirdness of the people who populate the upper reaches of the conservative think tank rackets. They obviously make enormous amounts of money doing very little, which is not the world of most Americans. They don’t keep regular hours at work, coming and going as they see fit. They live in communities that are set apart from the rest of America. They have little interaction with normal people.

None of this is new. Normal people learn quickly that the rich are not like the rest of us, despite the Hemingway quip to the contrary. The lack of want changes a man. Struggle, fear and the sleepless nights are the crucible of resourcefulness and creativity. The result is not just resourcefulness, but caution and prudence. It is the instinctive understanding of risk that comes from failure, what economists call moral hazard¹, that is at the heart of prudence. Pamper a man long enough and he loses this.

It is most obvious with our carny folk. Young people go into the circus hoping to become stars, but most spend their youth waiting tables, doing odd jobs and never doing more than some small parts in small productions. Some kick around as extras, making a decent living, but working hard. These are usually very sensible people because they know how hard it is to maintain their spot and they appreciate how quickly it can go away. It’s not an accident that these are the most right-wing people in Hollywood.

Then we have the stars who are magically plucked from the gutter and made rich, glamorous and famous. It’s rare for a mega star to have had a long apprenticeship or have struggled in bit parts for a long time. They tend to hit it big early in their career. Whatever sense they had is quickly squeezed out of them and they become spoiled toddlers, complaining about the unfairness of the world. Meryl Streep is a classic example. She hit the acting lottery and now lectures the peons about our lack of morality.

Now, Streep was probably nuts before she entered the carnival, but it does not take long for someone living like a noble to start thinking they are noble. If serendipity led you to a one-percent lifestyle, you can be forgiven for thinking that you were chosen. Further, you can be forgiven for thinking that things like hard work, prudence and loyalty are a sucker’s game. After all, the people who cherish those things live down in the valley, while you live up on the hill with the rest of the Cloud People.

This seems to be the dynamic in the managerial elite. They went off to college, ticked the right boxes and were magically transported to the top of society. Look through the biographies of famous pundits, media people and public intellectuals and you don’t find a lot of time in the fields with the sons of toil. Instead, you see biographies like the soon-to-be-president of France. Macron was literally plucked from the crowd, like Billy Ray Valentine from Trading Places. Why would Macron value hard work and struggle?

The consequence free world of the ruling classes not only makes them reckless; it makes them contemptuous of the lower ranks, particularly the middle class. It’s probably why the American Left adopted the anti-bourgeoisie language of Continental Marxists, despite living exaggerated versions of the bourgeoisie lifestyle. It just felt good. That appears to have been the motivation of those who sponsored Barak Obama’s political career in Chicago. The aging radicals who sponsored him knew he would offend normal people.

A California Democrat looking to flip a House seat in next year’s midterms believes he can appeal to both sides of the aisle — and even pitch progressive ideas to President Trump.

Ammar Campa-Najjar, a 28-year-old communications staffer and former campaign worker of Mexican and Arab heritage, says his background and resume put him in a position to succeed in the red district he hopes to represent.

“I talk about never being Arab enough in Gaza, Hispanic enough in the Barrio or American enough in the post-9/11 world,” he told The Hill during a recent interview.

“I just don’t come in with this preconceived notion of prejudice. … It allows me to have an open mind and be tolerant, see the world from their vantage point.”

I don’t know about the Arab and Mexican stuff, but I do know the reason he went from rent boy to political rock star is that he is “not American enough.” If he was an Irish guy named O’Shea, he would be working the business end of a shovel, rather than entertaining the Cloud People. Like an actor waiting tables, this guy’s whole existence is about cultivating a look in the hope of catching the attention of the right people. He may as well be an actor, as he is just playing a character he thinks will be in demand in the big show.

Read the rest of the article and it is clear that Ammar is as dumb as a hamster. He’s just repeating phrases he has picked up as an extra in his minor gigs in Washington. But, he has the look in demand with the Cloud People and he is about as alien to the native stock as you’re going to get, so he has a future in Progressive politics. It’s not hard to imagine a Prog version of Tom and Daisy Buchanan backing this clown’s political career because it let’s them piss on the little people, who they detest so much.

¹The term “Moral Hazard” has become a safe word for innumerate fetishists, who will be tempted to sperg on it. Save it. I’m not interested.

Sure enough what happened in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Other states should take heed & learn from our mistakes. Been here 5 generations; they keep coming & own it all; politically, culturally & economically.

Somewhere along the line it occurred to me that the seeming unfairness of life, where the Streeps have no name until they hit the acting lottery, is just the organizational behavior of the solution that members of society bob around in.

Hating on the fact that a few twits precipitate out from the societal solution and find their fortune on the bottom of the market flask seems like missing the point.

The capitalist answer would seem to be to shake the market flask a little bit more, and let some actual talent fall out.

Buckley’s prescription for choosing politicians … just pick random names from the telephone directory… could be equally applied to choosing our actors. Any random fool would be as good an actor as the carefully chosen fools we have now.

In acting, like in anything, there’s a range of ability. There are really hopeless duds (MST3K was good at finding them) and I suppose there are a few Mozart-level geniuses. Are today’s stars those Mozarts of the acting world? They want you to think so, but no one really knows. They’re stars because they hit the lucky combination of ability, opportunity, patronage, and who knows what other levers that tossed them to the top. Between those 2 extremes are lots and lots of very competent actors. I think that today’s stars are really not remarkable in their acting ability, and… Read more »

The funny thing about acting today is the talented people who can play multiple characters in multiple situations are not well paid. They make a nice living as character guys and supporting actors, but they are never stars. The stars have a narrow look and even more narrow range. They play one character really well, but only in a narrow set of situations. Sam Jackson is the most obvious example. He’s angry, shouting, bug-eyed black guy. If you need an angry middle-aged black guy, he’s great. Otherwise, he is not much value, other than name recognition. That’s the other thing… Read more »

I passed through Oklahoma and visited the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum. Very interesting – beautiful artwork and excellent displays. There was an entire section dedicated to the Hollywood cowboy; John Wayne, Henry Fonda,and many who were well before my time. It struck me the dignity these actors had in their real lives. Perhaps I’m wrong since I didn’t grow up hearing about then, plus no one was Twittering back then so we don’t really know what they were thinking about every 15-minutes. But I suspect they were real, genuine people who knew they were actors and didn’t pretend… Read more »

I always get a kick out of reading the biographies of the old actors. The males almost always served in the military with many having served in combat. In most cases, acting was just something they sort of fell into, rather than pursued as a career. There’s also the fact that most came from humble beginnings. The stratification of American society has reduced the chances for someone to rise from the lower classes into the upper classes. Modern actors are more often than not the children of middle and upper middle class families.

And then you have the Fatty Arbuckle crowd and the whole “showgirl” culture. For every Jimmy Stewart or John Wayne, you can also find, back in the day, variants of the Hollywood lifestyle that put most of the current debauchery to shame.

But aside from the cloud-gods and their clown-puppets there are 50 million or so Progressive professionals and middle-to-upper-middle-level corporate employees who spent a lot of years doing a lot of schoolwork and are working hard and anxiously at their jobs every day. These are people from the same social class as Scott Adams’ (the Dilbert guy’s) commenters; their kids and the Scott-Adams’-commenters’ kids will marry and have babies, and those babies’ babies probably won’t think Progressively when they grow up — they will be the gentry of a new feudal order.

Extremes meet, as they say, and this post reminds me of why the “high-low coalition” (popularized by Steve Sailer, but coined, I think, by Fred Siegel) worked so naturally. The people at the top and the people at the bottom of society both have contempt for the workers in-between. Black Ebonics vernacular is shot through with old carny terms like “mark” and “square,” words meant to denigrate people who play by the rules for being suckers. The Left loves to invert the old idiom “reap what you sow,” and reward people for behaving poorly (lobbying for cheaper tuition for illegals… Read more »

Clearly he and his bundlers/handlers hopes to repeat the Obama bio, which is just now beginning to unravel, displaying all its sordid splendor of soulless calculation. Anybody with the least familiarity with Chicago politics knew instinctively from day 1 that the JEF was a media manufactured creature of the local cloud hoping to take his/its act on the road.

But I think that the days of exotic ethnic immunity from scrutiny are, hopefully, over now. So, yah, he’s dumb. The question is how dumb are the voters in Cali. Sad to say, it *could* work again.

Keep in mind how many Californians vote the party ticket, most of them Dems, and that’s how this stuff gets done. It matters not who the candidate is, it is simply the “D” next to it that wins the votes.

I’m having a lot of trouble buying that all of a sudden Obama is a big ladies man. It sounds manufactured to me and you know they are not above fudging the historical record so that Obama doesn’t go down in the history books as gay.

“Struggle, fear and the sleepless nights are the crucible of resourcefulness and creativity. The result is not just resourcefulness, but caution and prudence.”

Also humility, which is the one thing that all Cult people lack. Dirt People do not defy God. Cult people laugh at Him.

Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind. C.S. Lewis

From what I’ve heard and read, guilt — or maybe guilt transference — is a part of it. You’re living in an apartment with four other wannabes when suddenly you’re plucked from obscurity and thrust into the center ring of the virtual tent. Meanwhile, your buddies are still back in the apartment working crappy jobs and trying to get the big break. Sure you try to stay in touch, but after a while, the demands of fame (if I were speaking, the sarcasm would be larded on the previous three words so heavily, you’d roll your eyes) pull you away.… Read more »

I think most normies who do well in life knows luck plays a big role. It’s why we have expressions like “I’ve been blessed” and “I’ve been fortunate.” But, normies also can connect the dots between talent, effort and the results. So yeah, you caught a break when you decided to join that startup that hit it big, but you also busted your ass and made sensible decisions too. Even extreme examples like Zuckerburglar get a pass to some degree, because he did come up with a way to steal the idea and he did bring it to market. Performers… Read more »

Thanks, Z. That was the post that turned me on to Ben Sassy. I can’t remember if Orwell lifted it from Burnham or some other thinker, but there is a theory out there that the true nexus of societal conflict is always between the top one or two percent and the up and comers in the next 10-15% (A. F. K. Organsky incorporates this into his geopolitical theories, too). In olden times, the one percent kept the middle down with religion and tradition, plus the occasional application of violence (if you’re a Marxist, I suppose you would argue that they… Read more »

My Broad Brush version is to think of Politicians as evolved Actors that have tired of just stealing money but now desire power as well.. There may be a few that don’t fit the mold but my bet is you wouldn’t run out of fingers and toes for the count

I love telling the story of when some careless clerk (or deep cover shitlord) in my college town rezoned half the grade schools in the faculty ghetto into the actual ghetto. The white flight clocked about Mach 4, but none of them learned a damn thing. I used to think this was because they’re nonpareil hypocrites, with some advanced cognitive dissonance-suppression technique unknown to us normies. But now I realize it’s that they just don’t care. Nobody they know is going to call them on it, and while we might, we’re just flyover country clodhoppers; who cares what the likes… Read more »

One of the features of the up-and-comers for a while has been their disconnection from the world of sh%twork during their teenage years. Lots of us who value what we and and have made of ourselves, did a lot of crappy jobs, some not so bad, others terrible, because that was the way things were. One of the attributes that made us different from, and better than the European contemporaries of the baby boomers was our connection to the world of real work. Europeans beat us to the game by importing Turks and North Africans to do these jobs in… Read more »

you know, everyone is bandying about the term “civil war” these days, to describe the mood of the US populace. But I wonder if a better word would be “revolution”? my anger is directed at an entire class of people, and their enablers. plus Trump is pulling a lot of dem voters, more every day (and this is what has all the uniparty scurrying) so ideology isn’t the driving factor of politics, at this time.

i guess my point is, just who is still being fooled by actors, and whom is not responding to them any longer?

It’s increasingly likely the Left is going to reap what they’ve spent the last century sowing. Marxist “praxis” requires setting classes against each other. Since most classes in America got along pretty well until recently (and, indeed, part of the American Myth was that we were a “classless society”), they had to invent some classes to fight each other and thus hasten the Revolution. Well, it worked — women hate men, gays hate straights, everyone hates whites, and now, finally, whites are starting to hate everyone right back. It may well lead to Revolution, all right, but not the way… Read more »

At some levels, I am a happy proponent of “lets you and him fight”. Let all these people with conjured-up grievances start things up by taking it it out on each other. I will likely keep the “Korean South Side Los Angeles shopkeeper” model in mind for me and my own.

There are a lot of bad politicians on both sides of the isle (a clear majority in fact), and voters put them there. At some point you have to address the fact that bad voters are part of the problem. Ditto for those spending hard-earned dollars on Hollywood’s propaganda output.

The disease is not confined solely to the cloud inhabitants. Society is getting sicker with each passing year. If we follow in the footsteps of the Romans, we will have earned our demise.

Not on topic exactly but I thought I’d share this message from my corporate overlords. Just came through on email. Fun eh?

“birthday and try out the Virtual Reality (VR) experience for yourself. Do you want to know what a misogynistic micro-aggression looks and feels like? Do you want to see other applications of VR in HR? Come and try the technology and meet us over drinks and snacks”

It might not be so bad to meet cute HR girls over drinks and snacks. Do they giggle when you micro-aggress them? Seeing it through their eyes would be too weird, though — like that guy in Strange Days who wants to experience a 17-year-old girl’s shower from her point of view.

Whatever is to come, I have given up on believing the White race will ever do anything…..until they are forced to. Right now, most middle class Whites actually believe they are well-off. And yet, they are all slaves. Debt slaves. The only difference between them and real slaves is that their ears aren’t pierced with an awl and they have “hope” for their children. Well, maybe they have had an awl bored through their ear. Piercings are fashionable for some fools. But, Whites will not resist until they have no other choice because they believe they have too much to… Read more »

As it has always been. What really bother me is why. What twisted natural selection unique to humans seems to routinely allow these types to float to the top? It seems for every Washington we get a thousand grifters. That does not seem like a good long term strategy for species survival.

“A republic, if we can keep it”…out of the hands of the people you are talking about. The Founding Fathers did a good job of setting up a political structure that diffused power and gave the “little guy” a variety of opportunities to exercise the “checks and balances” of the system. But like bunnies attacking a fenced garden, the people you are talking about probe every inch of the system to find the weak points, the points of entry. They use elements of the media and the broader culture to atomize our culture, and to break down the cultural affinities… Read more »

“As it has always been. What really bother me is why. What twisted natural selection unique to humans seems to routinely allow these types to float to the top? It seems for every Washington we get a thousand grifters. That does not seem like a good long term strategy for species survival.” All you have to do is corrupt the economy by introducing interest into it. Once you do that and introduce fiat currency, you have a money printing machine in place to manipulate the economy. It has been this way since Babylon (that we know of). When the “banks”… Read more »

I love the Gatsby analogy for the Trump family. The East Egg people utterly despise Donald, not just because he’s a West Egger, but because he doesn’t give a shit about them. He holds them in about the same contempt they hold him. How out of his place.

Contrast this to Kushner and Ivanka Trump. They’re good little Gatsby’s. They desperately want to be accepted by East Egg like they’re supposed to.

I wanted to link to it, but could not find it, but someone studied the path from start to stardom of modern actors. I think Sailer talked about it. What was remarkable is that stars hit it big early in their career and they tended to make it in the 20’s. There’s also a heavy bias toward those whose family is in the business.

The fact is, we have few older leading men these days. Most are cartoons or kids. The female leads are always 20-something powerskirts. There’s simply not much time to apprentice.

completely off topic.. has anyone here read this article? “ISIS using ads on CRAIGSLIST to lure hostage and murder victims..” on PJmedia? https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/2017/05/04/isis-to-jihadists-use-fake-apartment-job-craigslist-ads-to-lure-hostage-murder-victims/ There is a photo accompanying the article which purports to be a photo from ISIS’s Rumiyah magazine (i assume that Rumiyah is not published here in Brooklyn); yet i immediately recognized the street scene as being form my nieghborhood. When you look at this article at pjmedia.com, do you see a photo of this building: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.6345517,-74.0256678,3a,75y,165.45h,89.71t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1srRNmWGvXh7Q9PpAL3wpw5Q!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 Is Pjmedia, or the NSA, or Verizon, changing the photo for this article, depending on where (which IP address) it’s being… Read more »

One of the main factors that result in the “Peter Principle” of people being promoted above their ability into positions of power is that all organizations today are focused on “Management” of the company’s status quo instead of creative and risk taking yet responsible leadership. Nobody in management positions is empowered to make any decisions outside the established company procedure, except organize office parties like Michael Scott in the TV series “The Office”. I’ve seen good friends change into either cold -hearted company drones or nervous wrecks trying to implement top down directives from above and try to cheerfully attempt… Read more »

Which is why Apple will not buy Tesla. “Managers” like Tim Cook are scared to death of Elon Musk, who would run rings around them and seize the company, given half a chance. Steve Jobs was much closer to a Musk than a Cook.

I read this when you wrote it and have been thinking about the term “carny people” ever since. That is how the entire entertainment industry should be referred to and will be by me at least. It makes the fact that the entire culture is in the toilet make complete sense. How could it possibly be anywhere else with carny people as out moral arbiters.

Contempt of the lower classes is not just based on the lack of want, it’s also based on repulsion. I know Williamson can be a snob but Dalrymple writes about this stuff all the time. A lot of the Westernised lower classes are simply degenerate. (That’s not to say that the upper classes are some paragon of virtue, they just have more money to cover their mistakes.) There seems to be this attitude among a lot of the Dissident Right that while its fine for the upper classes to be called out on their degeneracy it’s taboo to do that… Read more »

Detroit was wrecked by the Blacks and Democrats who drove out the whites. Every major city that went into the crapper was because of blacks tand upper class whites who promoted and protected them. In fact almost every bit of injury inflicted on the country and people over the last 50 years came from those nice people. Prior to NAFTA and globalization, there weren’t many poor whites, decent paying jobs were plentiful,public schools were hell holes and people did okay. Did you know that violent crime in white towns and neighborhoods was just as low as it was in Europe?… Read more »

[…] The lack of want changes a man. Struggle, fear and the sleepless nights are the crucible of resourcefulness and creativity. The result is not just resourcefulness, but caution and prudence. It is the instinctive understanding of risk that comes from failure, what economists call moral hazard¹, that is at the heart of prudence. Pamper a man long enough and he loses this. […]